A great deal of effort in the electronics industry today is devoted to trying to produce the electronic product in the smallest possible package, while at the same time enhancing the product's performance. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the computer field, where personal computers have become increasingly smaller over the last few years. At the same time, the manufacturers have also tried to make the smaller computers as fast and as powerful as possible. This creates a problem in terms of heat dissipation.
In general, the more powerful the electronic semiconductor, the more heat it generates. Unless the heat is dissipated, the semiconductor may fail. There are a variety of well known devices for dissipating such heat. These include various finned heat sinks, which dissipate heat through the surface area of metal fins, and which may be and often are in connection with computers used in conjunction with electric fans, which drive air through the fins to enhance their cooling effect. Other types of heat sinks are also used, as well as other cooling devices such as cooling tubes, which extend around the devices and which carry a flow of some cooling medium. The problem with these existing devices is that they tend to take up a good deal of space. In fact, in many applications, the heat sinks, fans or other cooling devices take up more space than the semiconductors they are designed to cool. Moreover, these heat sinks and other related devices tend to take up "vertical" space. That is they tend to have a significant height, so that it becomes difficult to put them in a thin electronics package, at least without so severely downsizing them as to make them generally ineffective. By the same token, the effort to minimize the package for electronic devices such as portable computers by making them as thin and small as possible, while not sacrificing speed and power, makes the need for such heat dissipation means in these packages all the more acute.
Accordingly, an object of the invention is to provide a heat sink, which provides a significant amount of heat dissipation, while taking up very little space, particularly very little vertical space.